Todd Zywicki demonstrates just how confused political pundits are about climate issues.

Ellen Goodman writes today:

The only way to justify doing nothing about global warming now is to deliberately muddle the science.

Is it true that the only way to "justify doing nothing about global warming now is to deliberately muddle the science"? I think the answer is quite plainly "no." Even if it is true that global warming is occurring, this is only the first of many questions regarding whether we can justify doing nothing about global warming.

Who on earth is doing nothing? This is the intellectually bankrupt accusation of authoritarian anti-market advocates but it is utterly false. But that's not the only defect in Goodman's claims or Zywicki's refutation of them. Doing "something" isn't helpful and may in fact be worse in every way than doing "nothing" because we don't understand the climate system well enough to predict its behavior or alter the behavior in predictable ways no matter how hard we try.

The authoritarian big government impulse has repeatedly resulted in brain dead policies that blow up in our faces. They are either ineffectual or dramatically harmful. The twentieth century should have taught this lesson to even the dullest ideologues.

Zywicki does untangle some of the confused ranting of climate nutters.

. . . if global climate change is occurring, the question of whether we should do something seems largely irrelevant whether it is caused by humans or naturally-occurring.

So the real question to ask here is whether on net, the costs of doing something about global climate change outweigh the benefits of doing it. This is the same question we ask (or should ask) about every other intervention into nature--should we kill the parasites in water so that we can drink it, should we drain a mosquito-infested swamp to eliminate the risk of malaria, should we provide a vaccine to kill naturally-occurring smallpox. To imply that if the science shows we are changing the climate we must do something about it is as wrongheaded as it would be to say that if we are not contributing to global warming we should not do anything about it.

The defect here is in assuming that we can "do something". Draining the swamp is a far simpler natural intervention that will predictably result in fewer mosquitos. We have done experiments to verify this. Tinkering at the margins with atmospheric gasses is in no way comparable to swamp drainage. We have no idea whether this will make any difference or what the difference will be.

This isn't just objecting to Todd's hypothetical so the defect wouldn't go away with a better hypothetical. Swamp drainage is an utterly different type of intervention that does have some predictable consequences. Though irrelevant to this main objection it should also be noted that draining the swamps has had many, many unanticipated negative consequences as well, everything from floods to extinctions etc. etc. etc. Draining a swamp has mysterious consequences but at least its not the one and only swamp on the planet. The effects are local.

Who is deliberately muddling the science? It is crucially important that we have good understanding of natural systems to have any hope of intervening in them in predictable ways. But, Zywicki is only concerned with the legal issues involved. He does a good job of slicing through the spurious claims and twisted logic of Goodman, but still reaches a tentative but nonsensical conclusion.

If this is true, I want to suggest one way we can think about this is the "Box 4" that is familiar to Property professors in teaching the Coase Theorem (Spur Industries v. Del Webb). This would be to recognize the right of the net "losers" of global warming as having suffered a global nuisance from the net "winners," but to enforce it with a liability rule that entitles them to compensation, rather than a property rule that would entitle them to an injunction. The transaction costs seem too high to give them a property rule. Forcing the winners to pay compensation would also ensure that the net gains from global warming to the winners do in fact outweigh the net losses to the losers.

We can't know the truth. Even after the fact we can't attribute cause for observed effects. We may in some future become able to do so, it could happen, but it isn't certain that we will ever be so clever. Global issues like this expose not just the inadequacy of existing legal systems to deal with them, but also that legalistic approaches are inherently ineffectual. Any decisions will be faith based rather than fact based, and merely political in the end.

We have upheld the fiction of control of natural systems in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary by selective use of evidence and unreasoning faith. On the local level this has been inadequate but since the affairs were local a rough balancing of sorts occurred among all of the independent and distributed localities. They were all wrong but in different directions. We had, in effect, a market, a discovery machine. Trying to scale this legalistic kludge up to a global level makes no sense at all since we only have one planet so far.

We - in the sense of a controlling entity such as a nation or global institution - may not have any plans in progress but the real we - the independent and distributed populace - have a bewildering variety of plans in progress that in aggregate are far more effective since they are driven by far more information and skills, and react nimbly to the continuing flood of new information that results from discovery and feedback. All that Goodman and her ilk are really saying is that the bus left without them and runs all the stop signs and road blocks her cohort erect. I'm glad that this is so.